Small Messages, Big Computations

We’ve talked theory; now for some measurements. In this section, we’ll perform two experiments. We’ll map two functions over a list of a hundred elements, and we’ll compare the time it takes with a parallel map vs. a sequential map.

We’ll use two different problem sets. The first computes this:

 
L = [L1, L2, ..., L100],
 
map(​fun​ lists:sort/1, L)

Each of the elements in L is a list of 1,000 random integers.

The second computes this:

 
L = [27,27,..., 27],
 
map(​fun​ ptests:fib/1, L)

Here, L is a list of one hundred 27s, and we compute the list [fib(27), fib(27), ...] one hundred times. (fib is the Fibonacci function.)

We’ll time both these functions. Then we’ll replace map with pmap and repeat the timings. ...

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